(Part
4 of a series of 9 articles on the Beatitudes)
by
Pastor Paul Wolff
Jesus
said, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for
righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.” (Matthew 5:6)
Hunger and Thirst
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Jesus said, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness (justice), for they shall be satisfied.”
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Once
again in this fourth Beatitude, Jesus blesses those who seem to be
cursed
in the world. No one enjoys
hunger
and thirst. We want to be satisfied, but that is the point. We
hunger for those
things
which nourish and sustain our lives, but we
only
feel the
hunger pangs
for
that which we lack.
When our stomachs are empty we
feel pain, but when they are filled, then the pain goes away. When
we feel hungry, our bodies remind us that we need to feed on that
which gives us energy to work and nourishment to grow and to heal
injuries. Food
is a good gift from God, and hunger reminds us that we need “daily
bread” to sustain and grow and heal our bodies, so, in general, we
hunger for the good
gifts
of God which benefit us.
We
should remember
that
sin has corrupted our desires so that we sometimes hunger for “junk
food” which may provide calories to burn, but little
to strengthen and heal. There are other ways that sin can corrupt our
innate hunger to cause desires for too much or too little
nourishment, but for most people hunger is a good natural bodily
function which helps us remain
healthy.
There
is also a spiritual counterpart to physical hunger. This spiritual
hunger causes us to seek that which nourishes us spiritually. A
healthy spiritual hunger leads us to take in what is beneficial for
our spirit. We should be careful about this because sin has corrupted
our spirit so that we do not know what is good for us. People often
feel some exuberant emotion, and think that they are having a
“spiritual” experience, but it is still only a physical
experience. True spirituality only comes from God the Holy Spirit,
who gives us life-giving gifts. It is the Holy Spirit who is the most
good for our spirit because He brings Jesus Christ to us for our
forgiveness and salvation. The Psalmist writes, “As a deer
pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God. My soul
thirsts for God, for the living God.” (Psalm 42:1-2) Here
the Psalmist makes a comparison between the body’s need of water,
and the soul’s need for “the living God.” Physical thirst and
spiritual thirst are not the same thing, but they are similar. The
difference is that Spiritual thirst seeks after God, rather than
physical satisfaction. Jesus also
taught,
“Do not work for
the food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal
life, which the Son of Man will give to you. For on him God the
Father has set his seal.”
(John 6:27) This teaches
us that there is something more valuable than food. Even the best
food cannot sustain us forever. Because our bodies are corrupted by
sin, no food can sustain us forever. This
is why we hunger for the
eternal blessings which
only God
can give us.
Jesus
says, “Blessed are
those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be
satisfied.”
(Matthew
5:6) “Righteousness”
includes all things which are right, especially those things which
God considers good, right, and proper. God is truly righteous and
holy in all things, and the things which He desires are also good for
us because He loves us as a loving Father loves His dear children.
Yet, we are all rebellious sinners, having inherited the guilt of sin
from our parents, going back all the way to Adam and Eve. Because we
are sinners, we are not
the righteous people which we ought to be. This
separates us from God and makes us His enemy, and subject to God’s
righteous anger and punishment.
This is why we hunger for righteousness. We hunger for the good
things which we lack. Scripture says, “God
looks down from heaven on the children of man to see if there are any
who understand, who seek after God. They have all fallen away;
together they have become corrupt; there is none who does good, not
even one.”
(Psalm 53:2-3) Since we
are not righteous, we hunger for righteousness, and the good things
which come along with righteousness and goodness.
Biblical Examples of Hunger for Righteousness
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Jesus is the Living Water which springs up within His people to eternal life. (See John 4:7-14)
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Once
when Jesus was teaching (see Mark 10:17-27), a man came up to Him and
said, “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”
Jesus then responded, “Why do you call me good? No one is
good except God alone.” Jesus was neither denying that He
was good nor that He is God, but he was pointing out the fact that
the man wasn’t intending to confess that Jesus was perfectly good
and righteous, or that He was God. The man was just trying to flatter
Him as people sometimes do. Being truly righteous, Jesus was neither
flattered, nor did He think the man sincere, but he used this empty
flattery as a way to begin teaching the young man about the proper
distinction between Law and Gospel. At the end of this conversation
Jesus told him to give away all his possessions which he had turned
into idols. The man left sad because he realized that he was not as
righteous as he had previously thought, and could not rely on his own
righteousness to finally “inherit eternal life.” Jesus then
teaches His disciples by giving the famous illustration, “It
is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a
rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”
The
disciples are astonished and asked, “Who, then,
can be saved?”
Jesus said, “With man this is impossible, but
not with God. All things are possible with God.”
This
shows that God is our righteousness and our savior. We can only be
saved if God pays for our sins and makes us righteous. We
sinners can no more make ourselves righteous than we can make
ourselves inherit someone else’s wealth.
This
story (which is also found in Matthew 19 and Luke 18) shows a young
man who did
hunger
and thirst after righteousness, but initially believed that he had
achieved this in his life, but, when confronted by Jesus, and God’s
Law, realized that true righteousness can not be achieved by works of
the law, but is only found in God. If we are to become righteous, we
can only receive it as a gift from God, and not our own doing. All
our works are tainted by sin. Saint Paul wrote in Romans 3:19-20 “Now
we know that whatever the law says, it says to those who are under
the law, so that every mouth may be silenced and the whole world held
accountable to God. Therefore no one will be declared righteous in
his sight by observing the law; rather, through the law we become
conscious of sin.”
Here we see that God’s Law shows us our sinful condition so that we
cannot attain true righteousness by anything that we do, but must
instead rely on Christ to forgive us and make us truly righteous in
His own time (that
day being Judgment Day, which is also known as the Day of
Resurrection).
Saint
Paul also has much to say about man’s unrighteousness and the grace
of God in Romans 7, where after an
honest self examination,
he ends up by saying, “What a wretched man I
am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God –
through Jesus Christ our Lord!”
(Romans 7:24-25) Read
the whole letter to the Romans for more than I can explain here.
Saint Paul’s conclusion is that true righteousness must come from
God as a gift through faith in Jesus Christ, or else
we sinners can never achieve it. We, then, can never be satisfied
with our own attempts to attain righteousness because all our works
are tainted by sin. Yet, Christ has overcome sin through His life and
death, and He will
make us righteous as we ought to be in the life to come in His
Kingdom.
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Job hungered for righteousness. Though his friends mistakenly thought God was punishing Him.
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There
are many good examples of saints in the Bible who hungered for
righteousness. When Job first heard that tragedy had struck and all
his flocks and possessions and children had been killed and
destroyed, he mourned his loss (see
my article on “Blessed are those who mourn”),
but then he said, “Naked I came from my
mother’s womb, and naked shall I return. The Lord
gave, and the Lord
has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.”
(Job 1:21) Likewise, when Job was then afflicted with painful sores
his wife told him, “Curse God and die.” (Job 2:9) Yet, Job
replied, “You speak as one of the foolish women
would speak. Shall we receive good from God, and shall we not receive
evil?”
Again, Job trusted that God was not evil, even though all these bad
things were happening to him. He would not curse God, but trusted in
God to save him, even recognizing that God may have sent all the
trouble that he was experiencing. In
this way Job hungered and thirsted for righteousness because he would
rather suffer now at the hands of God than turn away from God and
reject God’s righteousness and promise of eternal
salvation.
Likewise,
there
are several times David
was
also a good example of someone who demonstrated hunger and thirst for
righteousness. When Goliath challenged
Israel to
send their best warrior
to fight him in single combat (see
1
Samuel 17), Goliath cursed Israel’s God when all the warriors were
too afraid to step up. When David heard the Philistine cursing God he
became angry with
a righteous anger. Since
none of the Israelites (from King Saul to Jonathan to even some of
David’s older brothers who were in the army) were going to step up
and defend God’s honor, then David was going to do it and show the
Philistines that their God is the true God. The
proof would be that God would give
a teenage boy the courage
and
strength to defeat and kill the
blasphemous giant pagan warrior, Goliath. Now,
David was not your ordinary Israelite. God had already sent the
prophet Samuel to anoint David as the next king, though it would yet
be many years before David was crowned king. Yet God was with David,
and
David trusted in God so much that He was
not afraid to stand against Goliath, even when King
Saul
and
all Israel’s soldiers were afraid to stand up to Goliath. David
was also given the courage to
fight in God’s name and for God’s honor and glory. David’s
hunger and thirst for righteousness was go great that he did not even
consider the likelihood of his own defeat and death, but was willing
to put his life on the line to show the Philistines (and the
Israelites) that God is the true God, and should not be despised, as
Goliath despised Him. David’s hunger and thirst for God’s
righteousness was satisfied when God gave him the victory over the
giant Philistine warrior.
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David hungered for God’s righteousness even when it endangered his own life to do so.
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David
also showed similar hunger and thirst for God’s righteousness when
King
Saul
was trying to kill David out of envy for the victories that God had
given him (even though those victories also benefited King
Saul
and all of Israel). There
were two instances where Saul was in reach of David’s sword, and
all he had to do was to reach out and kill him, (see
1 Samuel 24 and 26) but David refused to lift his hand against God’s
anointed king. In the second incident after David again showed Saul
that he could have killed him, but did not, David said, “The
Lord
rewards every man for his righteousness and his faithfulness, for the
Lord
gave you into my hand today, and I would not put out my hand against
the Lord’s
anointed.”
(1
Samuel 26:23) In the world’s eyes, David could have claimed
“self-defense” for killing Saul, since the King was intent on
killing David, even though David was not his enemy. Yet, for the sake
of righteousness, David refused to strike down God’s chosen king,
but trusted in God to deal with Saul as He saw fit. The
reason David did not kill Saul was not for Saul’s sake alone, but
for the sake of the promised Messiah (Christ). Saul was anointed by
God and was a kind of a messiah (anointed one). Saul was anointed as
King of Israel, but for the sake of God’s
promised anointed savior
(Jesus), David would not lift his hand against even an unfaithful
King Saul (whom
God had rejected because of his unfaithfulness)
because he had been anointed by God to be king.
Jesus
Hungered for Our Righteousness
Jesus
did not hunger and thirst for righteousness in the same way that we
do. Jesus was, and is, righteous in all things, so He didn’t hunger
for righteousness as if He was lacking in any way. Yet, Jesus did
hunger and thirst for our righteousness. Once, when Jesus was
on His way to Jerusalem, some Pharisees warned Him that Herod wanted
to kill Him. Jesus already knew that it wasn’t just Herod, but many
of the Pharisees also wanted Jesus dead, too. Jesus lamented this,
saying, “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the
prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often would I have
gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her
wings, and you were not willing!” (Luke 13:34) Jesus still
kept on His way toward Jerusalem, trusting that it was God’s will
that He should suffer and die to pay for the sins of all people –
including those who reject Him. Jesus wanted us all to be cleansed of
our sin and made to be righteous as God intended from the start. This
is how Jesus hungered and thirsted for our righteousness: He would
rather endure suffering and death than to let us all perish in our
sins and unrighteousness. Jesus knew that the only way we could be
made righteous is if He paid the price (death) for our sins so that
we could be washed clean and made righteous through His blood. This
is in some ways very different from our experience, but in other ways
it is similar. Jesus lived by faith, just as we do. He suffered just
as sinners do, even though He remained sinless, yet, He also had to
trust in God to save Him from death as we also trust in God to save
us because of what Jesus did for all of us.
Misplaced
Spiritual Hunger
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We hunger for that which we lack. This is why we hunger and thirst for righteousness.
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There
are also the spiritual equivalent of eating disorders which cause
people to hunger for what seems good,
but which actually is detrimental to the Spirit.
After all, no one ever seeks what they believe is evil. Even the most
evil person in the world does what he does because he thinks it is
good and profitable in some way. Such
people
may be tragically wrong, but they still seek what seems good to them.
Evil
sometimes starts out small and simple, but as a person’s conscience
gets more comfortable with sin the wickedness grows. It is important
to remember that love desires what is best for your
neighbor, while wickedness desires what I feel is best for me.
Unrighteous people hunger and thirst for wickedness. They hold
parades and celebrate all kinds of wickedness. Prostitutes and whores
desire to kill their unborn children, and don’t want to hear how
wrong that is, or how their children are a wonderful gift from God
instead of someone to be murdered. They celebrate all kinds of sexual
perversions from adultery to homosexual relations to all kinds of
perverse behavior. There is never any satisfaction for wickedness.
There can never be satisfaction for wickedness because God didn’t
make us that way. Wickedness and sin always leads to more, and it is
never enough. Only true righteousness in Christ can satisfy.
We
see this in
Genesis 4, God confronts Cain regarding his jealous anger. “The
Lord
said to Cain, ‘Why are you angry, and why has your face fallen? If
you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin
is crouching at the door. Its desire is for you, but you must rule
over it.’” (Genesis 4:6-7) Here God is encouraging Cain
to seek righteousness, but Cain insists on hungering for envy,
hatred, and eventually murder. God tells Cain that righteousness
isn’t a “zero-sum game” as if Abel’s righteousness precludes
Cain from also being righteous. If Cain was faithful,
like Abel, then God would be pleased with them both.
Cain had nothing to gain from killing his brother as if they were a
rival for something that only one of them could possess (God’s
favor) at the expense of the other. If they both were faithful to
God, then God would be happy to favor them both. Cain, instead
hungered for evil, and held on to his envy and sin, rather than
repenting and hungering for righteousness. In the end, Cain found
disfavor from both God and man, though God had mercy on him and
protected him from those who might seek vengeance.
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Jesus resisted the temptation in His hunger to turn stones into bread, so that He could be the bread of life for all who trust in Him.
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The
wise teacher says in Proverbs 4, “Do not enter
the path of the wicked, and do not walk in the way of the evil. Avoid
it; do not go on it; turn away from it and pass on. For they cannot
sleep unless they have done wrong; they are robbed of sleep unless
they have made someone stumble. For they eat the bread of wickedness
and drink the wine of violence. But the path of the righteous is like
the light of dawn, which shines brighter and brighter until full day.
The way of the wicked is like deep darkness; they do not know over
what they stumble.” (Proverbs 4:14-19) Because of the
devil’s temptations to make sin seem desirable (see Genesis 3:1-7),
there are some people who see great profit in wickedness, and they
take such pleasure in violence and evil that it becomes almost sacred
to them, or, if not sacred, then they idolize what is profane. In
this teaching, the “bread and wine” remind us of the Lord’s
Supper where Jesus gives us His body and blood with bread and wine to
forgive our sins and strengthen our faith. Yet the teacher notes that
the wicked people “eat the bread of wickedness
and drink the wine of violence.” This “unholy
anti-sacrament” results in wickedness and violence. These people
are like those who scream and yell and threaten (and commit) violence
against those who seek to save the lives of unborn children. The
pro-life people care more for the bastard children of the wicked than
they do themselves, yet, the wicked get angry and violent when their
licentiousness and murderous desires are exposed for what they truly
are. This happens because the devil tempts us to sin by making sin
seem desirable and profitable in some way. Godly people may be lured
by temptation due to weakness, but when they realize what they have
done they feel guilty and repent of the sin. When unrighteous people
sin they neither admit guilt, nor repent, but take pleasure and
“profit” in wickedness and try to curse anyone who would put an
end to wickedness and violence.
None
of this should surprise us because the Bible is very clear that sin
corrupts us all. There is no one who is good, not even one. In
Genesis 8, after the great flood, this is how God saw the world:
“Then Noah built an altar to the Lord
and took some of every clean animal and some of every clean bird and
offered burnt offerings on the altar. And when the Lord
smelled the pleasing aroma, the Lord
said in his heart, ‘I will never again curse the ground because of
man, for the intention of man’s heart is evil from his youth.
Neither will I ever again strike down every living creature as I have
done. While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat,
summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.’”
(Genesis 8:20-22) Now you might think that God sent the great flood
to get rid of evil in the world, so that only the good people
survived, but Noah and his family were also sinners, having inherited
sin from their parents like everyone else. When Scripture says that
“Noah was a righteous man” in Genesis 6:9, it doesn’t mean he
was without sin, but that he loved God and trusted God and listened
to God’s Word which promised rescue and salvation. God does not
condone sin and evil, but He provides for rescue in Jesus Christ.
Noah trusted in God and God counted Noah’s faith as righteousness
just as He did several generations later with Abraham (see Genesis
15:6).
Christians
Hunger for the Lord’s Supper
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Christians hunger and thirst for the body and blood of Jesus given in the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, so that we can share in the benefits of the sacrifice Jesus made for us all.
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In
the Old Testament times when the prophets spoke about hungering and
thirsting for God’s righteousness they were often thinking about
eating the roasted lamb of the Passover meal. The Passover was the
salvation event of the Old Testament for God’s people Israel. Every
year they were to remember it by preparing a male lamb for dinner
with unleavened bread. This was to show the Israelites how the
Messiah would come and offer His life as the sacrificial lamb to pay
for the sins of the whole world. The annual Passover meal reminded
the Israelites that God was their savior, and their eating of the
sacrificial lamb made them participants in the blessings of the
sacrifice. If Moses and the Israelites had refused to eat the lamb
then they would have been subjected to the same treatment as the
Egyptians. As the remembrance of this event became an annual
celebration, the Israelites would have hungered for the meal as the
time of celebration approached – hopefully hungering for the
Salvation which God promised to provide for them just as He saved
their ancestors.
Since,
by the time of Jesus, the Israelites had been celebrating the
Passover every year for over a thousand years (except for years of
apostasy), they should have recognized its fulfillment when Jesus
sacrificed His life for the sins of the world. Many did, and they
spread the good news of Christ’s salvation throughout the world.
Jesus also used the Passover meal as the basis for a new sacrament,
since He fulfilled the Passover prophesy. Jesus instituted the Lord’s
Supper in which He gives His body and blood in the bread and wine of
the sacrament in a miraculous way for the forgiveness of our sins,
and the strengthening of our faith. In this way we participate in the
sacrifice that was made for our sins (see 1 Corinthians 10:16) in the
same way the Old Testament Israelites participated in the sacrifice
of the Passover lamb. Christians now hunger for this blessed gift,
which is a taste of the eternal life which Jesus promises to all who
believe in Him to save them from sin and death.
Jesus
says that the blessing which comes to those who hunger and thirst for
righteousness is that “they will be filled (or
satisfied).”
Our hunger for righteousness will be filled when Christ comes
back and makes us holy and righteous as he is. Until that happens we
hunger and thirst for it because it is unfulfilled, but when Jesus
comes we will be satisfied forever in Christ. Until then we live in
the assurance of faith in God’s promises. In the Revelation which
Jesus gave Saint John, he sees a vision of those redeemed by Jesus,
and they are described in this way, “They shall hunger no
more, neither thirst anymore; the sun shall not strike them, nor any
scorching heat. For the Lamb in the midst of the throne will be their
shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of living water, and God
will wipe away every tear from their eyes.” (Revelation
7:16) Since the resurrection is a bodily resurrection, God knows our
bodily need for food and drink, and will provide us with plenty for
all eternity. John also sees this: “Then the angel showed me
the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the
throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the
city; also, on either side of the river, the tree of life with its
twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month. The leaves of
the tree were for the healing of the nations.” (Revelation
22:1-2) So we see that the new earth that God prepares for us to live
forever has plenty of wonderful food and drink which will sustain us
forever without death or decay. This is also something that we hunger
for, since all we know is decay and death in this sinful life. Yet we
are comforted in this life because God promises that we will receive
this, so we trust in God’s promises as we await their fulfillment.
Other articles in this series:
Blessed are the Poor in Spirit
Blessed are Those who Mourn, For They Will be Comforted
Blessed are the Meek, for They Shall Inherit the Earth
Coming soon:
Blessed are the Merciful, for They Shall Receive Mercy